Hot Art (7 page)

Then, on February 11, three armed men wearing masks visited one of the world's most important Impressionist museums, the Foundation E. G. Bührle in downtown Zurich. The gunmen stormed the galleries during operating hours. Staff and security guards hit the floor, held at gunpoint by one man. With precision and speed, the other two removed the museum's four most important paintings: works by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cézanne. Even Swiss police admitted that the armed robbery was “spectacular.” However, the theft was also eerie, because the scenario was familiar.

In August 2004, in Norway, two armed and masked men had entered Oslo's Edvard Munch Museum, also during operating hours. Tourists and staff scrambled onto the floor. The men were absurdly barbaric. They ripped two paintings from the museum wall, smashed the frames repeatedly to dislodge their delicate canvasses, then fled in an Audi. They'd stolen the most valuable works in the museum:
Madonna
and one of the most famous paintings in the world,
The Scream
. It was the second time in ten years that
The Scream
had been stolen. In 1994, thieves had gone for a night tour of Norway's National Gallery and walked away with a different version of the painting.

When a museum theft of great magnitude occurred, the ensuing media attention was usually intense and often referenced the art world's most popular ghost story, the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, in Boston. Two thieves wearing police uniforms entered the Gardner and tied up the security guard, and a dozen paintings simply vanished. The most famous was Johannes Vermeer's
The Concert
. Instead of replacing the Vermeer with another painting, the museum installed an empty frame. The Gardner theft became a symbol of all art thefts, and the works stolen that night remain among the most sought-after missing children of the cultural world.

The pattern kept repeating: A dazzling art theft would unfold in an otherwise serene museum. The eyes of the world would stare in amazement and shock. The media would mourn the loss of another precious painting pulled into the criminal vacuum. Museum directors would grumble about their limited security budgets. A few months later, another museum would be hit. The extreme nature of the crimes seemed to match in ferociousness the appetite of the art market itself. The higher auction prices climbed, the crazier art thefts became. But how did it connect, and what were thieves doing with those paintings?

A REPLY FROM
Paul was sitting in my inbox the next morning:

I am happy to give you any assistance I can for your book. I am a bit busy this week but next week is good and we can firm up a time to speak on the phone. All I ask for is a credit and perhaps a description as a leading authority on global art related crime... Let me know a contact number for you and when you are free next week. Kind Regards.

He sent me a phone number and we scheduled a call for the next week.

When I phoned, Paul answered with a tentative “Hahloh?” He had a working-class British accent, and there was a flat tone to his voice. As I later learned, a lot of different people call Paul, for a lot of different reasons, so on that day I could have been anyone in a range of categories—a petty criminal, a master thief, a detective from Scotland Yard or the local Sussex police force, an insurance adjuster, or one of the other shadowy souls I'll never know about. Paul added me to his weird list of contacts.

Our first conversation lasted about an hour. I asked Paul about his background and he didn't hold back. Yes, he had been an art thief and, in his opinion, quite a gifted one. “I've never held a real job,” he told me. “I'm a capitalist, through and through. Profit from pain. And I made a killing.”

Then he discussed some of the major heists of the past couple of decades, including the still-unsolved Gardner case. He seemed obsessed about the missing Gardner paintings, and told me he had spent years trying to figure out where they were. “They are the Holy Grail of art theft.”

When I asked him if he had ever stolen any famous paintings from a museum, he burst into laughter. “Do you think I'm a fucking moron?” Those kind of high-value, high-risk jobs weren't his style. They were unprofessional and only led to trouble for everyone.

“Headache Art,” he called them, “because they only give everyone involved a fucking headache! The criminals who get greedy and pull off high-profile art thefts are mostly idiots, they have no idea what they're doing most of the time. They just see that something is worth money and they take it. Greed is their undoing,” he said. “Stealing art is the easy part—moving it is the hard part. A good thief stays out of the spotlight, and under the radar. That's the golden rule.”

Paul said the goal of an educated thief was to avoid attracting attention. “Everyone wants to make money,” he said, “just like in any professional organization or company.” And there was more than enough money to be made stealing lesser-known artworks without drawing the eyes of law enforcement or the spotlight of the media. He pointed out that the media were seduced by the larger thefts—finding out where the multi-million-dollar canvasses were. But these were isolated spectacles that made for great cocktail conversation and Hollywood blockbusters. For the most part, very famous paintings were a trap for criminals. It was the Myth versus the reality of the Problem again, but from a criminal's point of view.

With the right training, a sophisticated eye for value, and the appropriate network of art dealers, an art thief had no need to steal from larger institutions, ever. “Thieves who steal from museums should be prosecuted. End of story,” Paul said.

He told me that he was retired, but when I asked how his day was progressing, he answered, “You know, I'm up to my usual Machiavellian ways.”

Toward the end of our first conversation, Paul said to me about art theft, “Once you start thinking about this subject, you will never be able to stop thinking about it. Every time a painting is stolen somewhere in the world and you read about it in the news, you will feel compelled to think about it, and to know where that painting went. It grabs you and never lets you go.”

We struck up what turned out to be a three-year conversation. In addition to being an art thief, Paul was an accomplished con man—and therefore a great storyteller. “I always use a paragraph when a word will do.”

PAUL ONCE TOLD
me a well-known joke that encapsulated his view of how people think. Two men are walking in the desert. Across the plain, they see a group of lions. More important, the lions see them. The lions look hungry. One of the men bends down and begins to tie his running shoes. His friend, watching him, points out diplomatically, “You'll never outrun those lions.” The man tying his shoes replies, “I don't need to outrun the lions. I just need to outrun you.”

Paul's career as a thief, he told me, was a study in the follies and hypocrisies of human behaviour, and it had resulted in a very specific view of how the world worked. “If you look at human beings, we are selfish and greedy. You drive one car, but you buy a second or a third car. Why does anyone have to own fifteen Rolls-Royces? One of the great philosophers of our time is George Lucas, and we are all a little like Jabba the Hut. We always want more than enough. In fact, we're the only species on the planet that gratuitously wants more than enough.” Another trait Paul focussed on was dishonesty. “It's more natural for a human being to be dishonest than to be honest,” he told me. “Each person is as despicable as the next. Everyone is out to fuck you. It's just that some people use lubricant.”

And no business exemplified lying, cheating, dishonesty, and greed more than the art world, according to Paul. “Deliciously dishonest” was his description of the industry. “That's the art world I came to know and love, and exploit.” In a lot of ways, his description of the trade matched Bonnie Czegledi's, but he was more brutal about it.

The real criminals weren't just the thugs running into museums with guns. They were installed at all levels of the industry and were willing to turn a blind eye to the looting of global cultural heritage because of a need to make money or climb the social ladder. The corruption and moral degradation didn't surprise him, though. It was the illusion of respectability that people associated with the art world that confounded Paul.

He was especially intense in his cynicism for art dealers. “I'd go as far as to say that the term ‘honest antique dealer' is an oxymoron,” he laughed. “No one cares about selling stolen art as long as you're smart about it. It's not even considered criminal. It's more as if it's naughty behaviour. You know... wink, wink. It's the norm.”

Paul was charming and eccentric, and he liked to joke around, but there was always an undercurrent of hyperawareness about him. He could lead you down a dozen different roads in a conversation, but he was always probing and listening intently for a reaction. He wanted to know what my situation was in life. “Are you married? Kids? Did you get a seven-figure advance for your book? I am probably going to be the most exciting character in your book, let's face it.”

Early on he mentioned a verbal altercation he'd had with someone, which ended with Paul saying, “If you fuck with me I will spend the rest of my life destroying yours. I will fucking destroy you.” I got his message. Sometimes talking to him felt like an interview with a vampire, because Paul had indeed been a vampire. He told me in detail how he spent years of his life stealing hard-earned material wealth from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of homes around him and selling those stolen items to art dealers and auction houses. But the more I talked to Paul, the more I came to think of him as the Cheshire Cat, always appearing out of the ether, posing absurd questions, offering paradoxes and philosophical arguments about the relationship between people and their possessions.

And just like the Cheshire Cat, Paul was intelligent and mischievous, although there was always a darkness to his personality that would suddenly cut through his playful charm. Still, when the Cheshire Cat disappeared, the last thing you remembered was his grin. Our phone calls would usually end with Paul telling a joke or a riddle, and then he was gone.

Paul wasn't just a thief, he was steeped in the lore of thieves, and he drew a line through British history from Jonathan Wild to John McVicar. Paul was a huge fan of Wild, a criminal genius in early-eighteenth-century London, a man who played both sides of society. He passed himself off as a saviour to the public by taking back from thieves items that had been stolen but he was indeed the king of London thieves. He orchestrated everything, and was eventually unmasked, convicted, and executed.

“Being a thief is a terrific life. The trouble is they put you in jail for it,” Paul laughed. He was quoting McVicar, one of the most famous armed robbers in 1960s London, who was convicted and sent to prison for twenty-six years. After he was released he wrote a book about his life that was eventually turned into a film starring Roger Daltrey. “As a kid, I always rooted for the villains in the movies,” Paul said.

We started to talk once, twice, sometimes three times a week. I would make an appointment and call, and he would always answer with that flat “Hah-loh.” (I sometimes heard the words as “Hell, Low.”) Over several months, Paul outlined his own creation myth of international art theft. He was Adam, in the garden, studying the apple on the Tree of Life.

Paul had perfectly balanced himself high up on a branch that overlooked the game, with a view both of law enforcement and of the criminals and thieves who were doing such an expert job of evading the law. He seemed to enjoy being on the shadow line of those two worlds, but it was always a mystery how deep his relationships were on either side. Like Jonathan Wild, he moved in both networks. But beneath the veneer, Paul possessed a coherent view of the multi-billion-dollar industry that was sweeping across the planet.

“It's a marvellous time to be an art thief,” he said. “Art theft has become one big game. It's just one big circular game. Art and antiques are objects that don't change. They remain exactly as they were made. What changes is who owns them. People pay small fortunes to own them for a period of time. So the objects get passed around the country, and now the world. Their value increases. Ultimately, they outlive us all.” Paul found the game of international art theft both amusing and absurd. Police were always ten steps behind thieves, and for every art theft that was publicized in the media, hundreds never made the news. These thefts were practically invisible—as if they had never happened. “For every Picasso that is stolen, there are hundreds of lesser-known works of art that are never reported,” said Paul.

If I hadn't already spent time learning about art theft from Bonnie Czegledi and Rick St. Hilaire, I would have been disappointed that Paul hadn't stolen from any major museums. But it was precisely because the two lawyers had both pointed toward the larger black market and the interplay among thieves, middlemen, and the network of international dealers that I became so interested in Paul, in the way he had operated as an art thief. He was a missing piece of the puzzle, and he confirmed much of what the lawyers and detectives feared was happening. He was exactly the kind of thief St. Hilaire had suggested I find—one who had perfected how to sneak through the system and make a profit without attracting attention.

It was easy to make a living from stealing art, according to Paul, if a thief made intelligent choices, if he stayed below a certain value mark—about $100,000. Less was better. Don't steal a van Gogh. To someone who knew how to work the system, the legitimate business of fine art became a giant laundry machine for stolen art. You could steal a piece and sell it back into the system without anyone being the wiser.

“It's called ‘pass the hot potato,'” Paul told me. “A dealer sells it on to the next dealer, and the next, until nobody knows where it came from. It's a fantastic system! And that system is the same wherever you are. It doesn't matter if you're talking about London, New York, or New Delhi,” he explained. “Art is something you have to think about as a commodity that goes round in circles. The only time it appears in the open is when someone tries to filter it into the legitimate art market—auctions, art fairs, gallery sales, dealers. Otherwise it's hidden away inside someone's home.”